Dull Tool Dim Bulb

Jim Linderman blog about surface, wear, form and authenticity in self-taught art, outsider art, antique american folk art, antiques and photography. Dull tool and dim bulb were the only swear words my father ever used. Items from the Jim Linderman collection of vernacular photography, folk art, ephemera and curiosities. (Note: if anyone believes an image contained violates their rights or insults their intelligence, simply point it out and I will remove)

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Among outsider art enthusiasts, The phrase "real deal" comes up often. Those who have become familiar with the material know what it means. It could be a certain look to the work. It can also be as much the artist's motivation as skill. Harry Bentz is what once would have been called the work of a Sunday painter or a folk artist. An amateur. Maybe he was an American primitive. Maybe not.

Actually the most accurate label would be Cowboy Artist. Mr. Harry Bentz was the real deal when it came to roping, riding and even mining. A real cowboy who made art. Untrained, but highly motivated to learn and create.

There are a few brief biographies. My guess is that Bentz found himself some time and started using it to make art. In the 1960s he painted what could be some 200 works. Along the way, he learned that through some primitive xerox (ayup) and a goofy photo stat process of some sort (ayup) he could make editions! Of a sort. The cowboy took advantage of modern technology available to the common man. Again speculating, I believe the artist wanted something to sell in a rack alongside his paintings at events. How many of these could range into the hundreds.

As with many primitive painters, he used found material to paint on. Some were uneven, large boards. Many of the sketches are on the reverse of used paper from the Bureau of Mines.

Apparently Bentz was working on a book. Among his papers are handwritten captions for "Sketches of the West" which would have been 60 pages.

The drawings would not have been shown art fairs, but at western events. In some ways, as far outside of the contemporary art world as one can be. He fished, hunted, broke horses, played the guitar and took out pack teams as a hunting guide. In 1951 he became a member of the Rodeo Cowboys Association. He began serious painting while working on a ranch near Kennewick, Washington. Reflected in his work is the life he lived.All paintings and drawings collection Jim Linderman.

Trench Art with a twist, but not all trench art was made in a trench. Generally, the term refers to art sculpture made from expended artillery shell casings. Nothing to do but stay down, cringe at the incoming and hammer copper. However this group of decorative items was made by a different group of soldiers. As noted on the reverse of the image, These fine examples were made by disabled soldiers as they recuperated. The material is taken from the remnants of old copper stills. Prohibition provided the material! World war one ended in 1918. Prohibition started in 1920. Must have been a bitter pill to have fought for your country only to return without having even a beer. The Trench Art of the Great War website refers to pieces like those above as convalescent soldier art. The Wikipedia entry for Trench Art suggests "Outsider Art" as a related category.

You might have heard the term "memory painter" as a slightly disparaging reference to artists who recreate pleasant rural scenes from the past in a folky manner. Grandma Moses comes to mind first, of course, but there are many more with varying degrees of skill.

Mary Drake Coles was a true memory painter. A successful artist who upon being diagnosed with glaucoma began practicing to remember how to paint. To this day there is no real cure for the disease. Some progress quickly, others delay blindness with prescription eyedrops and surgery to relieve pressure in the eye. Still, it is a diagnoses one wouldn't like to hear. Blind Artist is not a common phrase.

"I began trying to paint from memory as early as I could, while I still had some of my vision and could see what I was creating" she said. She established unchanging positions for her colors and her brushes. The first attempts were dire, but she persisted. After several years of practiceher vision was taken away fully, but she had developed an abstract style based on remembered realism. As of 1964, it is reported she had seven one-woman shows in NYC, three of which were held after she was sightless.

Work by the artist is hard to find. My attention was drawn by seeing an eBay listing for a group of her works. Several photos are cribbed from the auction. A wonderful film profile was posted several years ago by Legacy Connections Films.Mary Drake Coles from Legacy Connections Films on Vimeo.

See also Martha Vinyard Association HEREand L. A. Brown Photography HEREPhotographs (top) from article by Mel Stein from the National Insider February 18, 1964Listing on eBay HERE

A real photo postcard from the turn of the century depicts three children with odd dresses. The woman in charge is "Mrs. Davis" and all three youngsters have different last names. Each has a small number written on them, the corresponding names are written on the back. My first thought was they they could be orphans. Early visitors to Japan? Any guesses welcome.Real Photo Postcard c. 1900 - 1930. Collection Jim Linderman

A pair of interesting drawings by African-American Quilter Sarah Mary Taylor of Yazoo City, Mississippi. Circa 1993. Known widely for her quilts, I suspect she may have done several hundred drawings before passing on. These are surprising for their unusual form. Most of the drawings I have seen were designs based on her standard, repeated quilt figures. Hands, human figures and animals. I've always wondered if anyone has her original templates for quilting…and if she even used them! Free-hand pieces here represent a house (with a figure inside tucked under a quilt?) and numerous irregular squares. If Ms. Taylor made a "house" quilt, it would look more like this drawing than the traditional quilter's house form or pattern. Lots of crosshatching. The floating figure on the other piece? A melon abstraction within four corners. Cosmogram?

The house at the time I visited was not green. Then, her tiny place was painted a bright orange, and I cribbed a photo from wikipedia commons here. I have no idea how many houses she lived in, but I do know she had five husbands over her long life. It was hard to keep a family together in the Black south of the early 20th century.

Ms. Taylor was born near Betonia, Mississippi in 1916. A cook, a nanny and a field hand. Also from Betonia at the same time? Skip James. A blues musician of staggering talent who would have been performing around the area at the same time. Sarah would have been 14 at the peak of his depression-era career. Betonia had a population of less than 200 in 1900, and has only 500 now. Could she have missed him busking? He recorded a dozen or so sides in 1931 then went missing until musician John Fahey and others located him in the 1960s.

This is deep Delta. Betonia is right down highway 49 from Yazoo. I wish I had asked her if she remembered Skippy James. Both come from the same place, after all. The musician has the same root as the artist. Same well.

The drawings are now, as far as I know, in private hands. The one I gave my avid-quilting mother is lost.

Photographs of Lonnie Holley and his workshop at what has come to be known as the Birmingham Alabama Airport environment. They date to 1992 or so. I believe at the time this was both "studio" and home for the artist.

You'll find dozens of his sculptures (made from scrapped foundry sandstone) and hundreds of painted and shaped works of wire, fabric and detritus. It might look ragged, but every thing was purposeful and in place. Something out of a dream. While chatting and touring with the artist, I realized everything was connected through small caves from which children began to emerge. Beautiful, handsome young children who had been living (or hiding) in their places for safety. Shy at first, they romped like any kids as they became comfortable with my visit.

Holley had purchased the land intending to establish it as a refuge for artistic expression. He was certainly not one short of artistic ideas. Apparently the airport didn't agree and claimed the land. I hope the artist and his family received what was deserved, but it sounded like a land grab at the time. Mr. Holley was and is a genius. This is something I have learned to know and increasingly appreciate over the last 25 years.

A bizarre beatnik booklet from Beelzebub Books! 1959. Height of the non-existent beatnik revolution. An unexpurgated expose of the beat generation! (Which was largely a big-media invention in the 1950s...there were only about five real, actual, living beatniks.) Life Magazine had nothing on this shocking expose! It just one of the moronic magazines produced by one man. The book is "edited" with a pastiche of purloined press from "editor" Heater Wall. Heater Wall cribbed clippings and such from prominent "beatnik" writers and paired them with risque photos. "Heater Wall" was really Walter Hale. A carnival barker of a publisher. A legendary
huckster and promoter. Hale produced a string of vintage
vehicles which ran on dames, most of them burlesque dancers. He
distributed his magazines in an unusual manner…by giving them away at
carnivals and strip shows he promoted. In fact, the fine folks at Something Weird Video have even located..and generously provided, free of charge only to you, our special clients, step right up here today, an actual film of Hale
pitching his porn! Hale Published Tom Cat, Girls, Scandoll, Hollywood
Confidential and Play Girl (for which he was sued by no less than Hugh
Hefner) Enjoy the clip at the end of this article.The best part of Walter Hale product (other than the publicity photos of strippers from the golden age of stripping) is his alliteration. Never has a publisher run together so many words which start with the same letter. That is Hale taking his "step right up" slogans to the smut market. Shown here is but a few of the other magazines in the Walter Hale catalog. Collect them all!

Books by the author are available HERE as instant Ebooks and paperback or hardcovers at Blurb.

A wirephoto press photograph showing Percy Coplon as he prepares for drastic measures to control his weight. Caption reads "Plans to fast atop 30 foot pole. Percy Coplon, all 357 pounds of him, stands beside the tiny house in which he plans to fast for 100 days. Original 1949 Wirephoto Photograph. Collection Dull Tool Dim Bulb

"Perpetually ahead of the collecting curve...a one man Taschen. An authentically curious individual...diligently archiving the forgotten curiosities of American History"

Emma Higgins in Art Hack May 2012

"Jim Linderman likes Art, Antiques and Photography and his collection of Vernacular Photography, Folk Art, Ephemera and Curiosities is a wonderful place..."LifeElsewhere with Norman B. 2014

"...collected over the years by Jim Linderman, a character who seems the perfect subject for a Harvey Pekar comic. Linderman treats collecting like a calling, and his finds have a resulting air of authority, stunning in their capture of bygone picturesque moments."Derek Taylor Dusted

"The pictures, discarded artifacts of ecstatic Americana, come from the stash of Jim Linderman, who in his introduction recalls advice he’s plainly taken to heart: “Collect the heck” out of whatever you find interesting."Drew Jubera Paste Magazine

"His interest in art is rivaled only by his interest in music, and one expression informs the other. He pursues objects with thoroughness and an innate sense of curiosity..."Tanya Heinrich Folk Art Magazine

"Linderman acknowledges the obscure at the same time that he elevates it.... His collections tell vast stories in sotto voce, allowing curios and objects shadowed by mainstream culture and ideology to converse and be heard. What we hear is an enormous American sub-culture speaking in forbidden, marginalized languages: stuff discovered boxed in the attic out of embarrassment or zealotry, smutty ash trays crowing next to religious pamphlets, each claiming a part of the complex, sometimes contradictory, always conflicted American imagination, a chaos of memories that will one day vanish."Joe Bonomo Author of Conversations With Greil Marcus, Jerry Lewis Lost and Found and No Such Thing As Was

"Documenting--one clipping at a time--the scrapbook of a leg and garter aficionado that was dumpster-dived in Virginia in the 60s" "...an outstanding image-archaeologist who has compiled a shelf-ful of worthy and unique photographic histories."William Smith Hang Fire Books

"Linderman has a knack for discovering untold stories and introducing them to a wider audience"Joey Lin Anonymous Works

"Jim Linderman...makes us all look a little puny"Could it be Madness-this?

"...there's something beyond the endless photos and postcards and weird propaganda from another time that he lovingly documents - I think it's the collection as a whole, the portrait of a person fascinated with culture and communication. I have met people like this before, and in reading Dull Tool Dim Bulb I feel I have been lucky enough to meet one more. This site is a goldmine in terms of links..."The Hyggelic Life October 2009

"Linderman is always on the lookout for the new and exciting"Chuck and Jan Rosenak Contemporary American Folk Art

"...an amazing collection..."Revel in New York October 2009

"Jim Linderman has a nice little colllection of interesting books and blogs...But every so often he just loses it."American Digest March 2010

"FOR MOST OF HIS LIFE, COLLECTOR JIM LINDERMAN has searched high and low for authentic things--unique and special objects that define the artistic culture of the American experience. From folk art to popular culture, from pulp fiction to Delta Blues-- Jim is a walking authority on so many things American they are too numerous to mention. One thing is certain-- his collecting interests are for things that have fallen through the cracks, those things lost and forgotten--the box of material under the table at the flea market booth. If it wasn't for dedicated collectors like Jim Linderman-- so many important objects about our culture would have surely been lost to time and indifference."

"Jim Linderman maintains a most interesting blog about the most amazing things from his collection—a site he calls “Dull Tool Dim Bulb,” the only curse words his father ever uttered. I love it, and read it everyday.""...an excellent writer and I devour your blog daily. I am impressed at your deep knowledge of things within your niche..."John Foster Accidental Mysteries

"I am grateful to Jim Linderman for first alerting me to the existence of the 1930s Spiritualist hymn "Jesus is My Air-o-plane."William Fagaly New Orleans Museum of Art, Author Tools of her Ministry: The art of Sister Gertrude Morgan

"Linderman describes a long gone world...(he) claims not to be a writer but he is most certainly an excellent researcher..."BOOKSTEVE

"Jim Linderman, King of the Internet Ephemeral Arts"Spaniel Rage

"Jim is a fantastic historian...show him some love"Astrid Daley Fringe Pop / Sin-A-Rama

"Almost an experimental narrative"Idiopath

"He came to us with hundreds of jaw-dropping baptism photos that he'd been collecting for 25 years," Ledbetter explains. "By the time he found us, he'd already done half a lifetime's works, and he trusted us to handle it properly." Lance Ledbetter in Creative Loafing 10/13/11

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Although most of the images here are original photography and objects owned by the author and in the author's personal collection, we cannot absolutely guarantee the exact copyright status of the items or offer written assurance that every or any aspect of this work is completely cleared for all usages. Responsibility for making an independent legal assessment of an item and securing any necessary permissions ultimately rests with persons desiring to use the item.

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